


Come Home to your Heart

by Kit_Amongst_The_Pigeons



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Multi, OT3, Peggy isn't going to take your shit, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:42:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27578684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kit_Amongst_The_Pigeons/pseuds/Kit_Amongst_The_Pigeons
Summary: Hawkeye Pierce has long had the policy that if there's something you can't deal with, you should just ignore it.But some people just won't leave you be.
Relationships: B. J. Hunnicutt/Peg Hunnicutt/Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce
Comments: 3
Kudos: 34





	Come Home to your Heart

**Telegram:**

**From: BJ Hunnicutt, Mill Valley, CA**

**To: B. F. Pierce, Crabapple Cove, ME**

**Home safe STOP Bike too STOP Erin & Peg desperate to meet you STOP Come at once, don’t STOP**

**BJ.H.**

_Dearest Hawkeye,_

_Hello from Mill Valley. It’s a lovely spring day here, and we hope the weather is equally nice in Maine. I say ‘we’ because BJ and I are writing this letter together, although it’s all going to be in my penmanship as Lord knows I struggle to read his chicken-scratch. You being a doctor, of course, I’m sure you have lots of experience reading such awful writing._

_I hope you are well and that your father is as well. I’m sure he was almost as glad to see you as I was to see BJ. I know you missed your hometown. Are the autumn leaves as vibrant as you remember? A selfish part of our hearts hopes not; it might be easier then to convince you to come to California._

_It is a strange joy to miss someone you have never met and to wish for their nearness – I can only hope you know the emotion that I describe. BJ doesn’t understand – he had met us both – but his emotions are all the more present for knowing you._

_BJ says he can sense your disbelief already, the ridiculous man, but perhaps we should write of easier topics for a while._

_You remember the plot of land we bought? (He’s rolling his eyes now. Says he made such a fuss he’s sure there are Korean soldiers who remember it.) We’ve finally started to build. It’s just small cones marking out the edges of our dream home now, but it’s a wonderful start. However it goes from here, know you will always have a place there._

_Erin continues to grow at an alarming pace and is learning new things every day. Right now, she is sitting on BJ’s lap, doll in one hand, bear in the other, jabbering on to herself. We pick up occasional bits from her. I have read her many of BJ’s letters from the front (heavily edited) and though it’s cute when she points at dramatic dresses and goes “Kinger” or when she’s playing imagining games about Daddy and Hawkeye (which warms my heart), the other day, she called our neighbour’s annoying child ‘Ferret Face’ which has rather put a strain on our relationship (especially, says BJ, because she’s actually right)._

_How we long to introduce you two – we cannot imagine the trouble you will undoubtedly cause._

_We will not write the word, for fear it will scare you, and will say only this. How you feel is how we feel. It was not a figment of your imagination, nor a product of the circumstance. Know that you have made our lives better and that Maine will never again be your only home._

_We eagerly await your reply by letter, phone call, or your presence on our doorstep._

_Yours, always,_

_BJ & Peg _

Daniel Pierce stood by the kitchen sink, looking out over the veranda. Usually, he could be found here, watching the waves dance across the ocean, but for the last few months he had mainly been looking closer to home. Sitting, slouched, in the old wooden rocking chair that had stood there since the death of his mother, was Hawkeye.

The cold autumn air meant that he had wrapped a warm blanket over his knees and pulled a hat down to protect his ears. Daniel had already tried once to get him to come into the warmth, but he had refused.

His son, who drank milky-sweet coffee and traded quips with him over the crossword on Sunday mornings had never returned from the war. Instead, Daniel was faced with a man who would drink any coffee that you put in front of him as long as it wasn’t stone cold, and who sometimes woke, screaming the names of people Daniel had never met. 

Most of the time, though, he sat in that rocking chair and stared blindly.

Daniel would almost say that he was lonely – he recognised that look. He had seen it in the mirror every day for years after his wife died, and sometimes he would still catch glimpses of it in his newly wrinkled face.

He was disrupted from these musings by a knock at the door. Turning from the tableau of his son as quickly as old-age would let him, he moved along the hallway to greet the newcomer.

Whoever he had been expecting when he opened the door, it hadn’t been her.

She was a young slender woman, radiant in the pale morning sun. Her blonde hair fell in perfect curls at her shoulders, brushing gently at the bare skin above the collar of her dress. Her smile was brightest joy, her posture surest steel, and for a second, she reminded him of his wife on the day they met, but then she reached out to hug him and she was no-one but herself.

They chatted for a little, but he knew that she hadn’t really come to see him, so he told her he would put the kettle on and pointed her out of the backdoor.

**

Hawkeye ran his hands absentmindedly over the chair’s well-turned arms. He did most things absentmindedly these days.

It was as though all his laser focus had been sucked out of him in Korea, slicing up children and stitching his monogram onto their intestines. 

“Benjamin Franklin Pierce!”

The shout was so loud and so surprising that he nearly fell out of his chair, and half his coffee sloshed onto his feet. He turned, ready to heap abuse on the person who had so rudely interrupted his morning’s depression, but the sight of a woman he had only seen through a camera lens, only met through letters, stopped him cold.

His hand dropped automatically to his pocket, where the most precious letter of his life was folded.

“Peggy.”

Peggy Hunnicutt strode across the weather-beaten boards and planted herself squarely in front of him, hands on hips, one eyebrow raised.

“I’m waiting.”

“For?”

“An explanation, you ridiculous man! I can believe that you never received the telegram that BJ sent and I will give you the benefit of the doubt that our letter got lost in the mail. But ducking our calls? Now, that’s just rude.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know,” she said, kneeling to take both of his hands in hers, not caring about the coffee soaking into the front of her dress, “I know you are.”

Soft fingertips brushed callouses caused by so many scalpels. Hawkeye wanted to say something else, but there was something in her face that told him she wasn’t finished.

“I’ve wanted to meet you since BJ’s first letter home. You were such a force of nature in that letter, and such a source of comfort. I always wanted to thank you for that. For being that and being there, for him.”

Hawkeye couldn’t breathe – thank him? For clinging to her husband in a time of abject misery? For falling in love with him, no matter how many times he told himself BJ was hers?

“A few months after he got there, he wrote me a letter that was nearly entirely about you. He told me how much you were hurting and how long you’d been there compared to the other doctors and how each soldier you lost was a mark you could never erase. I wanted to hug you. To hug you and never let you go.”

He dropped his head to her shoulder, the remaining energy sapped from his body. Tears dampened her dress and he curled his fingers more tightly around hers, knowing that in a few minutes, he would have to let her go and let BJ go, too.

“But in every letter, he wrote about you. About how your eyes shine when you’re scheming, and your tongue goes a million miles faster than your brain sometimes. Stories in which you saved the day, or stayed up all night to sit with a really sick patient, or bent over backwards to help one of your friends. He told me, over months and months, all the things that made him fall so madly in love with you.”  
It was the first time that any of them had said the ‘l’-word. It wasn’t in the letter they had sent. He’d never said it to BJ, not even when holding it in seemed a Cnut-like task. 

She knew that BJ loved him. He braced himself for the blow. Now, she would blame him, tell him that he had corrupted her husband and that she had only written the words in the letter to make BJ happy, but she had come in person to tell him how disgusting she found it, him, and how he should stay away from them, so he wouldn’t taint their perfect family.

“Reading those letters… I fell halfway in love with you myself.”

He gaped. He, honest to God, hand on his heart, gaped – jaw lax, eyes wide. It couldn’t be that easy, could it?

“Come home with me,” she said, standing up and pulling him after her, “come and meet Erin, see Mill Valley. See BJ.”

“I don’t fit in that perfect picture, Peggy.”

“Nonsense. Just because I don’t know where you fit, yet, doesn’t mean I don’t know that you do.”

**

BJ reached down and scooped Erin out of the bath.

Even after all these months, he couldn’t quite believe it – she was right here, laughing and babbling and calling him Daddy. He wasn’t going to miss out on any more of her life.

His heart was so full.

And yet, it longed for something else. With Peg away at her conference, he had no-one else to talk to and Hawkeye… well, Hawkeye was ignoring him, and he couldn’t help but think that he had said something wrong, misunderstood something crucial and ruined everything.

It was as though he had managed to put all the jigsaw-pieces together to make a picture, but it didn’t match the one on the box.

Still, children didn’t wait for you have all of your thoughts nicely lined up. Erin was tapping her damp hands against his cheeks, and he duly gave her all of his attention. It didn’t do to dwell on things that he couldn’t change – not until Erin was asleep anyway.

He had just successfully wrestled her into her pyjamas and was heading to the kitchen to heat up her bottle, when the front door opened, and he heard footsteps in the hallway.

“Sounds like your mama’s home.”

He stepped through the kitchen door, wishing that he had had a bit more time to tidy the house before her arrival. All thoughts of unwashed pots and unwatered plants disappeared when he saw the entrance hall.

There.

Right there.

In the middle of his hallway, in California, wearing a set of civvies that included a knitted jumped about half a size too big, was Hawkeye. Standing beside him, the loving smile of a scheme-well-schemed on her face, was his beautiful wife.

“Hi honey, we’re home.”

He laughed. He couldn’t help himself; it was all too perfect. Peggy held out her arms for Erin and he pressed a kiss to her cheek, but she waved off his hug and pushed him in Hawkeyes direction.

For one blink of the eye, BJ wondered if this was the right thing, if they should stop now before it was too late, and then he looked into Hawkeye’s eyes, and saw warmth, love and fear. That wouldn’t do at all. 

He stepped forwards, wrapped both his arms around him and pressed a light kiss to his temple. Hawkeye’s whole body went limp instantly, and he pulled him closer, even the scant millimetres between them suddenly too far. 

“Oh, thank God, you’re home.”

** 

In the months since she had brought Hawkeye home with her, Peg had seen a change in both her boys. They looked healthier, now that they were eating proper food again and regularly getting enough sleep, but it was more than that. 

They looked like two people who understood their places in the world.

Sure, sometimes the tiniest thing would send one of them to a place she could never imagine, but, on the whole, they were doing better. She wondered if she was looking more like a person again, and not like the soon-to-be-widow she had felt like when BJ was away. 

She sat at the table, feeding Erin small pieces of pancake with fruit and syrup from her own plate, and sipping a cup of freshly brewed coffee. Hawkeye was at the stove, shimmying his hips along to the music that was streaming from the radio.

“I am the best dancer in all of Mill Valley,” he declared, rather dramatically, as he slid another pancake onto her plate.

“You aren’t even the best dancer in the kitchen,” said BJ, flailing his way through the door, arms waving and legs all over the place.

“I am so!”

The two of them began to do more and more ridiculous moves in an attempt to outdo each other, until all three of the adults in the room were laughing so hard that they could barely breathe.

When the boys had taken Erin to get ready for the day, Peg smiled a self-satisfied smile. And then the best dancer in Mill Valley did a quick two-step shuffle and went to find her family.


End file.
